WASHINGTON - The Transportation Security Administration misled the public about its role in obtaining personal information about 12 million airline passengers to test a new computerized system that screens for terrorists, according to a government investigation.

There have long been rumors that police canine officers carry aroundsmall quantities of contraband drugs which they can use to contaminatea motorist's car, causing their dogs to "alert" on the vehicle andthus justifying an otherwise illegal search of the interior and itsoccupants.

Many have dismissed such stories as an urban legend.

But what would happen if a group of Las Vegas Metropolitan policeofficers were actually found to have participated in such an activity?Would all be forgiven with a wrist-slap, if they merely said it was "amistake"?

While officers were in the process of arresting local resident MarkLilly last July on suspicion of selling harmless legal substances andclaiming they were narcotics, an official police spokesman now admits,canine officer David Newton placed real controlled drugs in Mr.Lilly's vehicle. He has since contended he did so "as a trainingexercise" for his dog.

It seems pointless to ask whether contaminating active crime scenes isan accepted time, method, or location for a canine "trainingexercise." A better question might be what Officer Newton was doingcarrying narcotics to an active crime scene in the first place. Has hebeen charged with possession of those narcotics? Were they of aquantity that would get anyone else automatically charged with"possession with intent to sell"?

A quick and inexplicable decision was made to disallow private registrations for .US domain names.

In early February of this year, a decision was made by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (?NTIA?) (http://www.ntia.doc.gov/)to no longer allow private registrations for .US domain names. For the record, the NTIA is part of the United States Department of Commerce. This article provides background as to how and why private domain name registrations came about, why the NTIA decision was inappropriate, and why this harms you.

You need to be alarmed about the NTIA decision, regardless of what domain names you own.First, don't make the mistake of thinking "I don't own .US domain names, so this won't affect me." It's true, the cancellation of privacy I am reporting to you now, just affects .US registrations. But I assure you, .US is just the first battlefield, it's the test to see if we will allow our privacy to be taken away. If we allow this to happen, the next step is to take away our right to privacy for .COM and other top level domain names. And then, if we lose this privacy, who knows what's next to go.

Private registrations started with a female customer who was in a panic.Just after the 9/11 disaster, I received a message to phone a new female customer who was in a panic. I was told she had purchased a domain name from us about a month or so earlier, and had used it to set up a very nice website for her new small business. I was also told that she now wanted to delete her domain name and take down her website.

She was a victim of a brutal stalker.After I called, and she picked up the phone, it was obvious she was terrified. What had her so upset was that for the past few years, she had been the victim of a malicious male stalker, and had since done everything she could to evade this monster. She believed that she had finally arranged her life where the stalker could no longer find her.

She was horrified to learn that all of her personal information had been made public.When she purchased her domain name, she provided all of her personal contact information. She then learned, to her absolute horror, that all of the information (name, address, phone, etc.) she provided became part of the public Whois directory ? which then became available (24/7) to anyone.

A quick decision protected our customer?s privacy and saved her business.After spending a few minutes talking to this terrified woman, I made a quick decision. I told her that I would replace all of her personal contact information in the Whois database with GoDaddy.com?s contact information.

We are lied to daily, falsely accused with illegal evidence and activity, and forced to have our private lives and papers spread out for their convenience. All the while, they hide deep in their bunkers and compounds, send their swarms across our lands, and defame our names with words like vigilante, and when this is pointed out, they- and the scared and feeble tell me I am paranoid.

These crimes have happened many times throughout History, but once Man said enough:

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

A few years ago I read this entire document, to a man I went to High School with, and without telling him what it was that I was reading. When I finished, he told me that the government would consider me a traitor if I made this public. I told him the government had already decreed that the men who had signed this paper were indeed traitors. I was flattered when he asked me if I had signed it, and I told him no, as I was not alive when it was penned and that it was our Declaration of Independence and signed in 1776- I could feel his shame come through the telephone line.

25 March, 2005

The Federal Election Commission yesterday took its first step in extending campaign-finance controls to political activity on the Internet, asking for public input on limited regulations for the freewheeling medium.

Commissioner Ellen Weintraub, who took the lead on drafting proposals with Vice Chairman Michael Toner, described the steps as "restrained." The commission emphasized a hands-off approach to bloggers, or authors of Web logs, among the loudest and unruliest voices online.

"We are not the speech police," said Mrs. Weintraub, a Democrat. "The FEC does not tell private citizens what they can or cannot say, on the Internet, or elsewhere."

The draft guidelines suggest applying limits that exist in other media to certain political advertising on the Web and political spam e-mail.

The six-member commission approved a work in progress and invited public comment for 60 days before a June hearing. Republican David Mason was the sole dissenter, the Associated Press reports.

The commission said it was exploring Internet regulation reluctantly "ordered to do so by a court" and with the lightest touch possible, exempting everything except certain kinds of paid political advertising.

Indeed, Mrs. Weintraub, you are "the speech police", along with your masters in the parties who have done everything they can to stifle and control speech and discussion of their crimes that are committed in the main Swamp and the smaller swamps across this land.

You say you call for public comment, but in viewing the main page of your fiefdom, checked with three different browsers, not one notice on your main page is available, it is nestled here, which you admit is submitted late and states:

If this is not the definition of "the speech police"madam, then I do not know what is, but then again, I am just one of the unwashed and uneducated masses that does not yearn, or will submit, to your control.

Accept this as the public comment from one you wish "hear" from, in written form:

Computing on the Net is heading for a fall because security is a joke. So we summoned the best minds to see if we could put Humpty back together again.BY SCOTT BERINATO

Professor Hannu H. Kari of the Helsinki University of Technology is a smart guy, but most people thought he was just being provocative when he predicted, back in 2001, that the Internet would shut down by 2006. "The reason for this will be that proper users' dissatisfaction will have reached such heights by then that some other system will be needed,"

Kari said, "unless the Internet is improved and made reliable."

Last fall, Kari bolstered his prophecy with statistics. Extrapolating from the growth rates of viruses, worms, spam, phishing and spyware, he concluded that these, combined with "bad people who want to create chaos," would cause the Internet to "collapse!"?and he stuck to 2006 as the likely time.

Kari holds dozens of patents. He helped invent the technology that enables cell phones to receive data. He's a former head of Mensa Finland. Still, many observers pegged him as an irresponsible doomsayer and, seeing as how he consults for security vendors, a mercenary one at that.

And yet, in the past year, we've witnessed the most disturbingly effective and destructive worm yet, Witty, that not only carried a destructive payload but also proved nearly 100 percent effective at attacking the machines it targeted. Paul Stich, CEO of managed security provider Counterpane, reports that attempted attacks on his company's customers multiplied from 70,000 in 2003 to 400,000 in 2004, an increase of over 400 percent. Ed Amoroso, CISO of AT&T, says that among the 2.8 million e-mails sent to his company every day, 2.1 million, or 75 percent, are junk. The increasing clutter of online junk is driving people off the Internet. In a survey by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, 29 percent of respondents reported reducing their use of e-mail because of spam, and more than three-quarters, 77 percent, labeled the act of being online "unpleasant and annoying." Indeed, in December 2003, the Anti-Phishing Working Group reported that more than 90 unique phishing e-mails released in just two months. Less than a year later, in November 2004, there were 8,459 unique phishing e-mails linking to 1,518 sites.

Kari may have overstepped by naming a specific date for the Internet's demise, but fundamentally, he's right. The trend is clear.

"Look, this is war," says Allan Paller, director of research for The SANS Institute. "Most of all, we need will. You lose a war when you lose will."

So far, the information security complex?vendors, researchers, developers, users, consultants, the government, you?have demonstrated remarkably little will to wage this war. Instead, we fight fires, pointing hoses at uncontrolled blazes, sometimes inventing new hoses, but never really dousing the flames and never seeking out the fire's source in order to extinguish it.

That's why we concocted this exercise, trolling the infosecurity community to find Big Ideas on how to fix, or begin to fix, this problem.

Our rules were simple: Suggest any Big Idea that you believe could, in a profound way, improve information security. We asked people to think outside the firewall. Some ideas are presented here as submitted; others we elaborated upon. Those who suggested technological tweaks or proposed generic truths ("educate users") were quickly dismissed.

What was left was an impressive, broad and, sometimes, even fun list of Big Ideas to fix information security. Let's hope some take shape before 2006.

This reader's viewpoint response post is right on the money:

large companies considered harmful to innovationPosted: MAR 23, 2005 04:33:24 PMthis just in: a group of bureaucrats at the helm of large companies threatened by innovation hold the suprising view that they should be allowed to control the pace of all innovation. In other news today, a military industrial bureaucrat believes that he could make us safer from vaguely specified threats if he is given billions of your tax dollars, a vague timeline, and lots of power.

I had a subscription to this trade rag for a couple of years, but became tired of using it for the liter box and dropped it last year. The article above is a good example why.

"If a political gaffe consists of inadvertently revealing the truth, then Sean Treglia, a former program officer for the Philadelphia-based Pew Charitable Trusts, has just ripped the curtain off of the "good government" groups that foisted the McCain-Feingold campaign finance bill on the country in 2002. The bill's restrictions on political speech have the potential for great mischief; just last month a member of the Federal Election Commission warned they could limit the activities of bloggers and other Internet commentators.

What Mr. Treglia revealed in a talk last year at the University of Southern California is that far from representing the efforts of genuine grass-roots activists, the campaign finance reform lobby was controlled and funded by liberal foundations like Pew. In a tape obtained by the New York Post, Mr. Treglia tells his USC audience they are going to hear a story he can reveal only now that campaign finance reform has become law. "The target audience for all this [foundation] activity was 535 people in [Congress]," Mr. Treglia says in his talk. "The idea was to create an impression that a mass movement was afoot. That everywhere [Congress] looked, in academic institutions, in the business community, in religious groups, in ethnic groups, everywhere, people were talking about reform."

The truth was far different. Mr. Treglia admits that campaign-finance supporters had to try to hoodwink Congress because "they had lost legitimacy inside Washington because they didn't have a constituency that would punish Congress if they didn't vote for reform."

So instead, according to Mr. Treglia, liberal reform groups created a Potemkin movement. A study last month by the Political Money Line, a nonpartisan Web site dealing with campaign funding issues, found that of the $140 million spent to directly promote liberal campaign reform in the last decade, a full $123 million came from just eight liberal foundations. Many are the same foundations that provide much of the money for such left-wing groups as People for the American Way and the Earth Action Network. The "movement" behind campaign-finance reform resembled many corporate campaigns pushing legislation. It consisted largely of "Astroturf" rather than true "grass-roots" support.

But the results were spectacular. Not only did the effort succeed in bulldozing Congress and President Bush, but it might have played a role in persuading the Supreme Court, which had previously ruled against broad restrictions on political speech, to declare McCain-Feingold constitutional in 2003 on a 5-4 vote. "You will see that almost half the footnotes relied on by the Supreme Court in upholding the law are research funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts," Mr. Treglia boasted."

Now, if one were seriously paranoid, or has read enough, one would ask why this is coming out now, and what do the Repuglicrats have to gain by it?

19 March, 2005

If you're happy to pay for your iTunes Music Store song downloads, but could live without that pesky DRM stuff the recording companies insist Apple inserts into each file, you'll be pleased to know that notorious hacker Jon Lech Johansen, he of DVD Content Scrambling System de-coding fame, has figured out how to do just that.

As the highly rated home to the likes of Abu Ghraib apologist Sean Hannity and the document-shredding constitutional scholar Oliver North, the Fox News Channel is about the last place you think of when it comes to quaint values such as due process, defendants? rights, and restrained government. Yet Fox is home to television?s fiercest defender of civil liberties, Judge Andrew Napolitano, the network?s senior judicial analyst and a regular on The Big Story With John Gibson, Fox and Friends, The O?Reilly Factor, and other programs. The 54-year-old Napolitano, the youngest life-tenured Superior Court judge in New Jersey history, is an eloquent and outspoken critic of government abuse of power, whether the topic is widespread ?testilying? by cops, eminent domain abuse by local and state officials, or the unilateral detention of suspects at Guantanamo Bay.

DAVIE, Fla. (AP) - Danny Joe Brown, the lead singer of the Southern rock band Molly Hatchet, died of complications from diabetes, his family said Monday. He was 53.

Brown died Thursday at his home in Davie, a suburb of Fort Lauderdale, his sister Lyndia Brown said.

"He had been in the hospital for about four weeks before he died, and he wanted to come home and he was home for 30 minutes when he died," Lyndia Brown told The Associated Press. "He was surrounded by his children and his wife."

In 1975, the Jacksonville native joined Molly Hatchet, named after a Southern prostitute who allegedly beheaded and mutilated her clients. Brown was frontman for its self-titled album in 1978, which went platinum. In 1979 the next album, "Flirtin' With Disaster," sold over 2 million copies.

Brown left the band in the early 1980s because of his diabetes.

After creating his own group, the Danny Joe Brown Band, he rejoined Molly Hatchet in 1982 to participate in the album "No Guts ... No Glory." The was album had limited success and the group eventually disbanded.

Molly Hatchet reunited and toured in 1996 for release of the album "Devil's Canyon."

Brown ended his career after a stroke in 1998, according to reports.

"Danny was way more than a signer for rock 'n' roll band. He was great brother, a wonderful son," Lyndia said. "He is going to be missed terribly by everybody."

I enjoyed MH many years ago, and just let their tunes slide from my regular listening until I went to see my older brother when he was dying. I had not seen him in ten years when I went, and it was a good week. Molly Hatchet was played quite a bit on that 1400 mile return journey, and exactly ten days after I returned, he died at 43...

Just think someone's very good yearly income for one tattoo-removal machine to help those poor unfortunates. Must make you want to see more of your monies redistributed, um- I mean used for such grand social purposes, ur- I mean, spreading democracy, oops- I mean, oh bullshit, let us just state stolen and be done with it...

Although the Violence Policy Center was featured prominently in the first 60Minutes story which ran in January, no VPC staff were interviewed on camera forthis piece. We are certain, however, that the story will add to the growingcontroversy over these deadly weapons and the need for stricter regulation oftheir availability.

DALLAS -- The only flag known to have survived the Battle of the Alamo has been found on display at a museum in Mexico, more than a decade after Mexican officials said they had lost it, a newspaper reported Sunday.

And,

"Fox spokesman Agustin Gutierrez Canet said, 'If the United States has some Mexican flags, perhaps there could be an exchange. But that's a hypothetical idea.'"

How about a nice white flag with a yellow streak and a big pile of shit right in the middle, but then again, No-Neck's suggestion that we just hurl the shit from a catapault across the river does have it's merits.

VirginiaAllen, RobertBaugh, John J.Carey, William R.Garnett, WilliamGoodrich, John CampHerndon, Patrick HenryKenny, JamesMain, George WashingtonMalone, William T.Mitchasson, Edward F.Moore, Robert B.Northcross, James

Mar. 4, 2005 - A couple's plans for a birthday party for their former pet chimpanzee turned tragic when two other chimps at an animal sanctuary escaped from their cage and attacked. The man was critically injured with massive wounds to his face, body and limbs, and the attacking animals were shot dead.

St. James and LaDonna Davis were at the Animal Haven Ranch in Caliente to celebrate the birthday of Moe, a 39-year-old chimpanzee who was taken from their suburban Los Angeles home in 1999 after biting off part of a woman's finger.

Moe was not involved in Thursday's attack, said Steve Martarano, a spokesman for the California Department of Fish and Game.

The couple had brought Moe a cake and were standing outside his cage when Buddy and Ollie, two of four chimpanzees in the adjoining cage, attacked St. James Davis, Martarano said. Officials have not determined how the chimps got out of their enclosure, he said.

LaDonna Davis, 64, suffered a bite wound to the hand while trying to help her 62-year-old husband, Martarano said.

The son-in-law of the sanctuary's owner killed the attacking animals, Martarano said.

"He saw what was happening and had one kind of weapon with him and then got another he felt would be more substantial and shot them," Martarano said. "He pretty much saved a life."

St. James Davis had severe facial injuries and would require extensive surgery in an attempt to reattach his nose, Dr. Maureen Martin of Kern Medical Center told KGET-TV of Bakersfield. His testicles and a foot also were severed, Kern County Sheriff's Cmdr. Hal Chealander told The Bakersfield Californian.

Davis was transported to Loma Linda University Medical Center, where he was undergoing surgery late Thursday, Martarano said.

Buddy, a 16-year-old male chimp, initiated the attack and after he was shot, Ollie, a 13-year-old male, grabbed the gravely injured man and dragged him down the road, authorities said.

03 March, 2005

19:00 02 March 2005Exclusive from New Scientist Print EditionDavid Hambling

The US military is funding development of a weapon that delivers a bout of excruciating pain from up to 2 kilometres away. Intended for use against rioters, it is meant to leave victims unharmed. But pain researchers are furious that work aimed at controlling pain has been used to develop a weapon. And they fear that the technology will be used for torture.

"I am deeply concerned about the ethical aspects of this research," says Andrew Rice, a consultant in pain medicine at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital in London, UK. "Even if the use of temporary severe pain can be justified as a restraining measure, which I do not believe it can, the long-term physical and psychological effects are unknown."

The research came to light in documents unearthed by the Sunshine Project, an organisation based in Texas and in Hamburg, Germany, that exposes biological weapons research. The papers were released under the US's Freedom of Information Act.

One document, a research contract between the Office of Naval Research and the University of Florida in Gainsville, US, is entitled "Sensory consequences of electromagnetic pulses emitted by laser induced plasmas".

It concerns so-called Pulsed Energy Projectiles (PEPs), which fire a laser pulse that generates a burst of expanding plasma when it hits something solid, like a person (New Scientist print edition, 12 October 2002). The weapon, destined for use in 2007, could literally knock rioters off their feet.

More on this can be researched here, and I have to say thanks to CSMK for sending the original link in.

02 March, 2005

When I write that I like Mexico, that it enjoys much that we have lost, that Latin societies are more livable if less prosperous than ours, dismissive letters arrive. They amount to the same letter: "If Mexico is so great, how come they all want to come to the United States?" The writers invariably believe that they have made a telling point.

Mexico is not so great, of course. It has plenty of problems. But why do Mexicans swim the river? Money. Period. If asked, an immigrant will usually say that he seeks "una vida mejor," a better life. He means "Money."

Mexicans and gringos have distinctly different views of the United States. An American explaining the attractiveness of his country will usually say, "I have a big house in the suburbs, three cars, a home theater, and 300 channels on the cable. I can drink the water, and in the mall I can buy anything, absolutely anything." He may talk of freedom and democracy, often having only the vaguest idea of whether he actually has them or what conditions might be in other countries.

A Mexican is more likely to say, "They are such a cold people. They don't know their neighbors. They don't know their children. They have no fiestas. Rules and being on time are more important to them than other people. They have no religion." (To a robust Catholic, bland agnostic Protestantism isn't detectibly a religion.) Democracy means little to an illegal with a second-grade education; in any event, Mexico is probably as democratic as the United States. He knows the government left him alone in Mexico, which is his definition of freedom. And mine.

Fred continues with:

Further, Latin Americans resent the United States for its great wealth and for their own poverty, which they tend to blame on exploitation by American corporations. Whether this characterization is correct (it isn't) doesn't matter. The resentment does.

Mexicans know that much of the American southwest was once part of Mexico, taken from them by force of arms. Americans, having been the victors and in any case being historically illiterate, know little of this. Mexicans do. Few know the dates or the politics, yet they have a sense of grievance, a sense that these states are really theirs. They are getting them back. They know it. They view the reconquista with the relish with which they watch a Mexican soccer team beat the US.

Anonymous and I were discussing this last night, and Fred Reed's article is very telling indeed...

"The Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union, commonly known as the Articles of Confederation, formed the first governing document of the United States of America. They combined the colonies of the American Revolutionary War into a loose confederation. The second Continental Congress adopted the Articles on November 15, 1777, after 16 months of debate. The Articles then languished for another three years before ratification was completed on March 1, 1781."

And,

"Perhaps the most important power that Congress was denied was the power of taxation: Congress could only request money from the states. Understandably, the states did not generally comply with the requests in full, leaving the confederation chronically short of funds. The states and the national congress had both incurred debts during the war, and paying congressional debts became a major issue."